An Article by D.M. (1346. words, 7 min. read)
There are exhibitions that showcase art. And then there are exhibitions that ask you to question everything you think you know about how images live, speak, disappear, or endure. Becoming Icon at the Sursock Museum is not a display of icons—it is an inquiry into what it takes to become one.
Moving between recognition and erasure, memory and forgetting, this exhibition offers a charged meditation on the dynamics of visibility. Some artworks stand at the center of the room, radiating presence. Others lean quietly against the edges of history, nearly overlooked. Together, they reveal how narratives are constructed, communities are imagined, and memory becomes form.
Becoming Seen, Becoming Held
Curator Yasmine Chemali has not simply arranged a collection. She has designed a confrontation—with the museum, with time, and with the fragile mechanics of cultural authority. Drawing from the Sursock Museum’s permanent holdings, alongside key loans from private and public collections, the exhibition interrogates how artworks are elevated, circulated, or left to vanish.
The show is organized through conceptual chapters: Form, Unity, Community, Landmark, Model, and more. Each term punctuates the gallery walls not as explanation, but as provocation. They invite the visitor to look again, more carefully, and to ask: What does it mean to remember something visually? What defines symbolic weight? What constitutes legitimacy?
Shafic Abboud – Enfantine (1964)
Shafic Abboud’s Enfantine bursts with luminous abstraction, a canvas that resists definition while suggesting emotion at every turn. Painted during a pivotal moment in his career, it expresses his gradual shift toward lyrical abstraction. The composition feels improvised yet precise, acascade of gestural blocks in gentle greens, dusty roses, deep blues, and creamy ochres.
This work does not depict a child, yet it evokes childhood. It evokes touch, memory, softness, and movement.
“Enfantine invites the viewer into a world that is tactile, radiant, and free,” reads the curatorial note.
Abboud once described abstraction as “the only space where the eye can walk without being told where to go.” In this painting, he offers that freedom, blending French influences like Bonnard and the Nabis with deeply personal, sensory memory.
Etel Adnan – Mount Tamalpais (1985)
Etel Adnan’s iconic Mount Tamalpais vibrates with quiet devotion. Planes of pink, lavender, emerald, and stormy blue gather into a fractured image of the California mountain that became the artist’s most intimate subject. This is no passive landscape, it is a companion, a presence, a spiritual axis.
“The mountain became her identity,” said her partner, Simone Fattal.
For Adnan, this mountain was not just a subject, it was a recurring ritual, painted over and over again through seasons and states of mind. Her brush does more than description, it invokes. The painting becomes less a scene and more an apparition: an enduring icon formed through obsessive love.
Rendered in thick, unmixed color and shaped into poetic abstraction, this work transcends geography. It belongs as much to Lebanon as it does to Sausalito. It stands not for place, but for presence.
Saliba Douaihy – Untitled (Syriac Inscription) (1968)
In this rare work by Saliba Douaihy, language and form become indistinguishable. A field of bold color is interrupted by a Syriac inscription; one that appears ancient, almost archaeological, yet vibrantly modern. The work evokes a search not only for style, but for spiritual essence.
Douaihy once asked, “Where do we find the divine? It is found where there is neither color nor mass.”
His paintings, while formal in structure, are theological in ambition. He was deeply influenced by the purity of Sufi architecture, stained-glass geometry, and Kant’s aesthetics of the sublime. The inscription here functions as an anchor, a script that ties the visual to a lineage of belief, presence, and revelation.
Rafic Charaf – Migration (Bird) (1965–1968)
Rafic Charaf’s Migration stands tall in stillness. A black, jagged silhouette floats above a blue horizon. It is birdlike, but not entirely a bird. It appears as a cipher, perhaps a warning, perhaps an echo of displacement. Charaf’s paintings from this period reflect the psychological weight of a nation on the edge.
“His works carry an existential tension,” writes the curatorial team, “rooted in place, but haunted by flight.”
This piece was created years before Lebanon’s civil war, yet it feels prophetic. The loneliness of the form, the absence of movement, the saturated blue that offers no solace, all combine into a meditation on exile. The bird is neither flying nor resting. It hovers. Watching. Waiting.
Bodies in Rhythm, Spirits in Form
In the central wall of the exhibition, Paul Guiragossian’s painting rises like a chorus of voices rendered in vertical strokes. His signature brushwork—vivid reds, emeralds, deep blacks—assembles not individuals but presences. Stripped of detail yet overflowing with emotion, his figures lean into each other, carrying the weight of shared longing. Guiragossian once said, “I paint humanity”, and in this canvas, humanity is gathered, layered, and uplifted.
Nearby, Hussein Madi’s Jeu d’amour [Game of Love] radiates with another kind of rhythm. His stylized forms pulse with calligraphic energy, moving in repetition like an ancient dance. Inspired by Islamic ornamentation and natural geometry, Madi saw abstraction as a spiritual search. He described this phase of his practice as a moment of “extracting the essence of life forms”, and indeed, his painted alphabet fuses script, motion, and divinity into one unified breath. Together, these two works hold space for both the collective and the cosmic.
Maryam Khairo – The Model as Witness
In a powerful narrative embedded within the exhibition, the figure of Maryam Khairo emerges not just as a muse, but as a monument. Discovered at thirteen by painter César Gemayel, she became Lebanon’s first official nude model, posing for decades at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts.
“I felt ashamed at first,” she once said. “But over time, I grew more confident. César would tell me, ‘You grow more beautiful and colorful—you will enter history.’”
She did. Her body became the training ground for generations of artists. She was painted by the likes of Michel Basbous, Yvette Achkar, Helen Khal, and Hussein Madi. And yet, until now, her name remained in the background.
This exhibition restores her visibility. It recognizes modeling not as passive posing, but as a form of embodied contribution. Maryam’s presence was foundational to an entire era of Lebanese visual art. Through her, the model becomes more than a reference—she becomes memory made flesh.
The Curator: Yasmine Chemali
This entire exhibition carries the unmistakable voice of Yasmine Chemali—curator, historian, and cultural excavator. Trained in art history and heritage conservation at the École du Louvre, she served as head of Sursock’s modern and contemporary collections before moving to France, where she now directs the Centre of Photography in Mougins.
Chemali’s curatorial eye does not aim to display; it aims to unearth. In Becoming Icon, she interrogates the museum’s role not as a neutral container but as a living participant in memory-making. She poses urgent questions: Who gets seen? Who is framed? And what power lies in the act of looking?
A Museum That Feels Like Memory
Every room at Sursock carries a distinct emotional climate. Some walls hum with joy; riotous color, scenes of collective life, moments of gathering. Others feel heavier, more meditative, filled with silence and distance.
And yet there is cohesion. Despite the multiplicity of styles, media, and periods, there is a shared sense of urgency. Every work in this show seems to ask not only to be seen, but to be carried. To be remembered. To be made meaningful again.
To Become Icon Is To Endure
An icon is not made by admiration alone. It is shaped through repetition, through inheritance, through time and touch. It is something we return to, not for what it shows, but for what it holds.
At the Sursock Museum, Becoming Icon offers this exact space of return. A space where the overlooked are re-seen, where the familiar is re-felt, and where art regains the power to echo through lives.
Some images do not fade. They settle into us. They remain.
